“ Neither then nor at any other time did she take any active share in politics; but she was not without indirect influence on affairs, because her strong royalist and legitimist traditions prevented the court from including her in the suspicion with which her husband’s liberal views were regarded. ”

“ Driven from Naples in 1798, the Neapolitan royal family fled to Palermo, and the years from 1800 to 1802 were spent by Marie Amélie with her mother at the Austrian court. In 1806 they were again in flight before the armies of Masséna, and it was during the second residence of her father’s court at Palermo that she met the exiled Louis Philippe, then duke of Orleans, whom she married in November 1809. Returning to France in 1814, the duke and duchess of Orleans had barely established themselves in the Palais Royal in Paris when the Hundred Days drove them into exile. ”